Trade: Gun control, global warming

President Barack Obama could still make a push for two key goals of his administration — curbing global warming and gun violence — but he might do it in a more indirect way: through major trade proposals.

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Environmental protections are a big focus of three massive trade agreements the White House is pursuing, and, here at home, the Obama administration has moved to prevent U.S. firearms from being sold around the globe.

Lame-duck presidents often make broad policy changes by executive, rather than legislative, action in the latter years of their second terms, and Obama’s trade efforts are no different. Although Congress must give final approval to trade agreements, often through expedited “fast-track” procedures, the nitty-gritty decisions on what goes into the talks are the White House’s to make.

The same is true of restrictions on U.S. exports. Although Congress has gotten involved in deciding what kinds of technology can be sold overseas, the now-repealed 1999 ban on satellite exports over fears of spreading warhead-carrying rocket technology being a prime example, export controls are largely an administrative issue — one that the administration is diving into head first.

Since 2009, the Commerce, State and other departments have been combing through tens of thousands of controlled military items — nuts, bolts, door handles, toilets, but also fighter jets, tanks and firearms — to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses that want to sell the products outside the United States.

The U.S. firearms industry was expecting the easing of export restrictions to open up a massive foreign market once the administration completes the overhaul. But in 2012, the mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., spurred Democrats and some Republicans to push hard for gun control, with Obama calling for a vote on a bill in last year’s State of the Union speech.

While the vote never happened, the message, along with more than two-dozen executive orders to counter gun violence, called the plan to relax gun export regulations into question. After an intense interagency debate, the administration for now has steered clear of overhauling those restrictions.

“If I had to guess, the administration might say it’s better these come later so it doesn’t create a firestorm on issues unrelated,” a former senior Commerce official told POLITICO.

Environmental standards are under negotiation in a pair of blockbuster trade deals with Pacific Rim countries and the European Union, and U.S. and EU trade officials announced a plan with China and 11 other participants this week to boost the “green goods” trade.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks focus almost entirely on bridging the regulatory differences between the United States and European Union on the environment, chemicals, food and numerous other areas because tariffs between the two governments are already low and won’t take much effort to address. Both sides began to eye the talks, which began last year, as a way to speed up their nearly two-decade-old effort at regulatory cooperation.

With the trade negotiations, “you have sort of a time frame, you have a clear start and finish,” said Jeff Werner, general manager of international and public policy at Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz. “You have the political signals coming from both administrations — the commission leadership and the Obama administration here — to say, ‘this is important.’”

But a European Commission proposal to set up a panel to promote regulatory compatibility has the stoked fears of public interest groups, which say the deal could trigger a race to the bottom on environmental standards, which are generally more robust in Europe.

The joint “regulatory cooperation council” of senior U.S. and EU government officials would take into account “substantive joint submissions” from industry groups and others in drafting its proposals, according to documents leaked by Corporate Europe Observatory.

The proposal aims to accommodate the Chamber of Commerce and BusinessEurope and keep the U.S. and EU governments updated on each other’s legislative and regulatory proposals on trade; the leaked papers show — “a complicated system which will enable decisions to be made with no real public oversight or engagement, and with all doors wide open to business lobbying,” Corporate Europe Observatory said.

Meanwhile, environmental groups also oppose controversial provisions in the U.S.-EU deal, as well as the Pacific agreement, that would allow corporations to sue the governments before private trade tribunals over laws that cut into their profits — often making environmental protection or public health measures the target of such lawsuits under similar provisions in other trade deals, the groups said.